'So help you what? What can a fat girl like you hope to do in a situation like this, except blubber?'
'You fucking creep.'
'My pleasure.'
'Do I know you?'
'Yes and no,' the tone of the voice was wavering.
'You're a friend of Ricky's, is that it?' One of the dope-fiends he used to hang out with. Kind of idiot-game they'd get up'to. All right, you've had your stupid little joke,' she said, 'now get off the line before you do some serious harm.'
'You're harassed,' the voice said, softening. 'I understand ..." it was changing magically, sliding up an octave, 'you're trying to help the man you love ...'its tone was feminine now, the accent altering, the slime becoming a purr. And suddenly it was Garbo.
'Poor Richard,' she said to Birdy. 'He's tried so hard, hasn't he?' She was gentle as a lamb.
Birdy was speechless: the impersonation was as faultless as that of Lorre, as female as the first had been male.
'All right, I'm impressed," said Birdy, 'now let me speak to the cops.'
'Wouldn't this be a fine and lovely night to go out walking, Birdy? Just we two girls together.'
'You know my name.'
'Of course I know your name. I'm very close to you.'
'What do you mean, close to me?'
The reply was throaty laughter, Garbo's lovely laughter.
Birdy couldn't take it any more. The trick was too clever; she could feel herself succumbing to the impersonation, as though she were speaking to the star herself.
'No,' she said down the phone, 'you don't convince me, you hear?' Then her temper snapped. She yelled: 'You're a fake!' into the mouthpiece of the phone so loudly she felt the receiver tremble, and then slammed it down. She opened the Office and went to the outer door. Lindi Lee had not simply slammed the door behind her. It was locked and bolted from the inside.
'Shit,' Birdy said quietly.
Suddenly the foyer seemed smaller than she'd previously thought it, and so did her reserve of cool. She mentally slapped herself across the face, the standard response for a heroine verging on hysteria. Think this through, she instructed herself. One: the door was locked. Lindi Lee hadn't done it, Ricky couldn't have done it, she certainly hadn't done it. Which implied-
Two: There was a weirdo in here. Maybe the same he, she or it that was on the phone. Which implied -
Three: He, she or it must have access to another line, somewhere in the building. The only one she knew of was upstairs, in the storeroom. But there was no way she was going up there. For reasons see Heroine in Peril. Which implied -
Four: She had to open this door with Ricky's keys.
Right, there was the imperative: get the keys from Ricky.
She stepped back into the cinema. For some reason the house-lights were jumpy, or was that just panic in her optic nerve? No, they were flickering slightly; the whole interior seemed to be fluctuating, as though it were breathing.
Ignore it: fetch the keys.
She raced down the aisle, aware, as she always was when she ran, that her breasts were doing a jig, her buttocks too. A right sight I look, she thought for anyone with the eyes to see. Ricky, was moaning in his faint. Birdy looked for the keys, but his belt had disappeared.
'Ricky ...'she said close to his face. The moans multiplied.
'Ricky, can you hear me? It's Birdy, Rick. Birdy.'
'Birdy?'
'We're locked in, Ricky. Where are the keys?'
'... keys?'
'You're not wearing your belt, Ricky,' she spoke slowly, as if to an idiot, 'where-are-your-keys?'
The jigsaw Ricky was doing in his aching head was suddenly solved, and he sat up.
'Boy!' he said.
'What boy?'
'In the John. Dead in the John.'
'Dead? Oh Christ. Dead? Are you sure?'
Ricky was in some sort of trance, it seemed. He didn't look at her, he just stared into middle-distance, seeing something she couldn't.
'Where are the keys?' she asked again. 'Ricky. It's important. Concentrate.' 'Keys?'
She wanted to slap him now, but his face was already bloody and it seemed sadistic.
'On the floor,' he said after a time.
'In the John? On the floor in the John?'
Ricky nodded. The movement of his head seemed to dislodge some terrible thoughts: suddenly he looked as though he was going to cry.
'It's all going to be all right,' said Birdy.
Ricky's hands had found his face, and he was feeling his features, a ritual of reassurance.
'Am I here?' he inquired quietly. Birdy didn't hear him, she was steeling herself for the John. She had to go in there, no doubt about that, body or no body. Get in, fetch the keys, get out again. Do it now.
She stepped through the door. It occurred to her as she did so that she'd never been in a men's toilet before, and she sincerely hoped this would be the first and only occasion.
The toilet was almost in darkness. The light was flickering in the same fitful way as the lights in the cinema, but at a lower level. She stood at the door, letting her eyes accommodate the gloom, and scanned the place.
The toilet was empty. There was no boy on the floor, dead or alive.
The keys were there though. Ricky's belt was lying in the gutter of the urinal. She fished it out, the oppressive smell of the disinfectant block making her sinuses ache. Disengaging the keys from their ring she stepped out of the toilet into the comparative freshness of the cinema. And it was all over, simple as that.
Ricky had hoisted himself on to one of the seats, and was slumped in it, looking sicker and sorrier for himself than ever. He looked up as he heard Birdy emerge.
'I've got the keys,' she said. He grunted: God, he looked ill, she thought. Some of her sympathy had evaporated however. He was obviously having hallucinations, and they probably had chemical 'origins. It was his own damn fault.
'There's no boy in there, Ricky.'
'What?'
There's no body in the John; nobody at all. What are you on anyhow?'
Ricky looked down at his shaking hands.
'I'm not on anything. Honestly.'
'Damn stupid,' she said. She half-suspected that he'd set her up for this somehow, except that practical jokes weren't his style. Ricky was quite a puritan in his way: that had been one of his attractions.
'Do you need a doctor?'
He shook his head sulkily.
'Are you sure?'
'I said no,' he snapped.
'OK, I offered.' She was already marching up the rake of the aisle, muttering something under her breath. At the foyer door she stopped and called across to him.
'I think we've got an intruder. There was somebody on the extension line. Do you want to stand watch by the front door while I fetch a cop?'
'In a minute.'
Ricky sat in the flickering light and examined his sanity. If Birdy said the boy wasn't in there, then presumably she was telling the truth. The best way to verify that was to see for himself. Then he'd be certain he'd suffered a minor reality crisis brought on by some bad dope, and he'd go home, lay his head down to sleep and wake tomorrow afternoon healed. Except that he didn't want to put his head in that evil-smelling room. Suppose she was wrong, and she was the one having the crisis? Weren't there such things as hallucinations of normality?
Shakily, he hauled himself up, crossed the aisle and pushed open the door. It was murky inside, but he could see enough to know that there were no sand-storms, or dead boys, no gun-toting cowboys, nor even a solitary rumble-weed. It's quite a thing, he thought, this mind of mine. To have created an alternative world so eerily well. It was a wonderful trick. Pity it couldn't be turned to better use than scaring him shitless. You win some, you lose some.
And then he saw the blood. On the tiles. A smear of blood that hadn't come from his nicked ear, there was too much of it. Ha! He didn't imagine it at all. There was blood, heel marks, every sign that what he thought he'd seen, he'd seen. But Jesus in Heaven, which was worse? To see, or not to see? Wouldn't it have been better to be wrong, and just a little spaced-out tonight, than right, and in the hands of a power that could literally change the world?